Survey Shows Most Clicks on Mobile Ads are By Accident?

There are plenty of reports out there that show just how popular mobile advertisements are, and how the industry around them is quickly growing. With millions of dollars flooding into mobile advertising, it might be time to step back and determine whether or not consumers are actually tapping and clicking them.

Sure, we know they are getting tons of taps and driving a huge amount of traffic, but is this because users are interested in the ad, or because the ads are sometimes hard to miss on the mobile devices.

A new survey was conducted by Button and App Annie to attempt to answer that question.

They surveyed 1106 smartphone users in the US, aged 18-73. In it, they asked how often they intentionally click advertisements on their devices.

The results found that the vast majority of people ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ click these ads on purpose.

For millennials, 17% reported that they never tap mobile ads, and 42% said that they do it, but rarely. Another 31% said they sometimes click the ads. Just 8% said they do often, and 2% very often. The Gen X’ers were fairly similar with 18% saying they never clicked the ads, 46 said rarely, 28% said sometimes, 6% often, and 2% very often.

To put it simply, while ads are getting clicked on a regular basis, it is typically going to be an accident. It stands to reason that accidental clicks are going to perform much worse than intentional clicks, and marketers should keep this in mind before buying.

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Michael Levanduski is the assistant editor of Performance Marketing Insider, and an experienced freelance writer. He writes content for a wide range of sites in virtually every niche, though he specializes in technical writing as well as creating content for the performance and internet marketing industry. Michael was born in Grand Rapids, MI where he still lives with his wife and three children.